July 5, 2016

Random acts of meh

So the 3 billion cap value Standard Life has frozen trading for 28 days on worries that the property market is going to take a dive, because they are worried that if people cash in it will snowball and become a self fulfilling prophecy….

property funds are allowed to do this in law because the money has been spent on property, not shares, and property can be harder and slower to sell, it is true that if you want completion in 12 hours you’ll take a hit on the price, but still, surely those buying in is enough to pay off those cashing out, after all, you can never lose in property.. right..?

Land Securities have over recent years basically bought up 60% of the centre of my local city, which was all post war buildings after the centre got flattened in WW2 by the bombs, nothing over three stories high, most of it two, plenty of wide open spaces, and bulldozed the lot, and build a glass and concrete canyoned monstrosity that tries to be a mall outside and fails, and it’s all Apple and Next and Prada and River Island and other chains in there, nobody else could afford it.

It’s telling that since it was built three or four years ago I have been there more in my old job as a network engineer that I have been there as a local consumer.

Of course the main “fault” with the old scheme was the same “fault” with old housing estates, look at all that grass, we could build extra housing on that and make more money.

That’s the problem with old style whoring, one punter comes along and takes that whore off the street for 30 minutes, in the new modern way of doing things the punter only rents one hole for 30 minutes, creating two new available profit centres in the existing real estate, better still, get 10 year old girls as whores, the smaller bodies mean you can pack em in tighter and still have three holes for rent.

It’s like the problem with TV, back in the day in the UK there were 3 channels, and even then there were people who flatly refused to over tune their TV to one of them, nowadays there are probably 150, and the next stage is youtube with tens or hundreds of thousands of channels, and they are all totally fucking shit.

Just for shits and giggle for the last three months on and off I have been doing the “not interested” and telling them why, I’ve already seen it, I don’t like it, I don’t like the channel, I don’t like the recommendation based on something I have seen.

After 3 months, they should be getting it right, but it’s still videos with “all new 2016” in the title that have been there 6 years, videos that I have seen before, they just got renamed, “fai”l (sic) videos, “funny” videos, “karma” videos, “dashcam” videos, and “gamer”” videos, 9,732 different channels all about how to play Fallout 4, 988 of which deal with the new Contraptions workshop DLC, none of which go into any detail of why it is total crap, why it does not work, why it cannot be made to work, and so on.

Well, for values of “work” that include using it for actual production for a settlement / settlers / armies… it works perfectly if by work you mean creating some heath robinson device that looks a lot like you might imagine a factory will look, but which doesn’t actually do anything useful.

See, at it’s most basic, you create an infinite loop, a hopper, into which you transfer ALL you shit, which dumps onto a conveyor that feeds back into the hopper, so then you can create a branch off that loop to a maker of pork and beans, so when pork goes by it grabs it, and when beans go by it grabs it, and everything else goes around the loop.

You or settlers just regularly dump all your shit in the hopper, if you dump pork or beans the maker of pork and beans will grab them from the belt.

That’s how it SHOULD work, and I’m not going to go into the 99 reasons why it doesn’t, and why the control interface for the builders sucks, or anything else, this isn’t about Fallout 4, this is about how we have 9,732 channels dealing with Fallout 4 and 988 of those have specials on the contraptions dlc, and NOT FUCKING ONE OF THEM rips the shit out of it for being crap, when it could have been great.

You know, I get how a shitty home made pipe pistol with 18 damage may not down a super mutant or boss monster with one shot, I get that, I really do, but my .50 cal anti material rifle with 600 damage taking 4, 5 or 6 shots per fucking super mutant?? I’m playing on survival difficulty level.. not ludicrous difficultly level.

I guess it’s like property developers and whores, the whole thing is so good so lets cram more in in the name of the holy prophet, whereas before one headshot was good enough for a kill, now we need ten, so we sell ten bullets, great innit… all hail mammon.

What’s that? You want to sell your Mirelurk meat NOW before the market crashes? Fuck that lone survivor, you have to hold on another 28 days, at which time we tell you to hold on another 28 days, and so on.

So here is a pop quiz, which main UK political party is *not* going through a leadership crisis?

Sadly, or gladly, depending on your POV, I am not close enough to the inner working of these things to know if this is a case of rats fighting for survival on a sinking ship or not, and by rats I mean the politicos, not the behind the scenes movers and shakers who always seem to prefer the same type of people to end up as party leaders irrespective of what the common fucking man wants we are going to be offered Leadsom / May, two witches with banker / lawyer backgrounds who both pledge immediate resumption on turbo with steroids of the trident submarine programme…. again, pure, fucking, coincidence….

Brexit means as much to these people as a falling leaf in a forest.

What do the chilcot report and hitlary’s eff bee aye investigation have in common, neither one is going to say anything controversial before an election… thank you, I’ll be here all week.###

But the feeling on the streets (which the politico types are always too busy to sample) is “odd”.

“Dat’s RAYCIS!” is being labelled at the whole Brexit thing, since the vote we have all gone raycis, and the news is full of hate crimes against Polish people here and guys dropping off bags of rancid pork at mosques.

But, it goes much much much deeper than that, in this city there is a groundswell of activity and angst against the university students bringing their cars here are clogging up the streets and parking spaces, this is but one of *many* examples I could give.

The Spanish “estrangero” was often translated as “stranger” or “foreigner” but it actually meant “not from here” and the definition of “here” could be very very local indeed.

That is what I am seeing, not racism so much as y’all ain’t from round heahabouts, I know, because I am…

The guy went from “You can’t park there buddy” to “here, put this resident/business sticker in your windscreen” in the space of 3 minutes, because I knew where there used to be two pubs and a chip shop in that street view…… sure, you might be able to guess one of the pubs from the architecture, but you won’t know it’s name, the landlord’s name, what sort of pub it was, or anything else.

It’s not a thing that can be googled or facebooked or automated by data mining or anything else, back in the war it was how spies were caught, and other spies were not caught, “fucking germans turned Claude’s patisserie into a social club?!!… not that Claude ever did any work, it was his wife who did that, he just talked to everyone…”

And just because “since records began in 1995” according to some database or other, doesn’t mean there aren’t people who know different,

Land Registry, all those other things, none of them can tell you what I can tell you for a fact about what you see in that picture, what it was bought / sold for in 1950’s, how much land came with it, wich of the buildings you see now were just shells, walls and no roof, which crops were grown, the name of the local farmer…

There are Foreigners living in that house, about the 4th set in a row, come from London, white english monied retired, *they* don’t know this shit.

Edgar Mitchell’s grandson is going to treat me better that he will treat you or anyone else, because old Edgar and my grandad didn’t like each other, which does not matter now, what matters is three generations of knowing of one another that we know about.

I can remember being broke and sat on a boat in the bay of Athens many years ago, met a small group of Poles, they were starting up poland’s first yachting magazine, since the depression of the seventies and eighties and Lech Valesa (sp?) of the Solidarity movement… now poland is a fairly prosperous country again, you think a turkish immigrant is going to fit in there any better than me today?

It’s the old “if it does not fit in a spreadsheet it does not exist” mindset at play, shades of Fallout 4, where the models have become so good, it is so easy to forget they have zero basis in reality, they are just models, so when your contraptions workshop dlc does not allow you to build a proper working factory that integrates into the rest of the world model, it doesn’t matter, it’s a heath robinson virtual potemkin village, you can have all sorts of fun playing with the model, and that is the sole purpose of the model…

Of course they are all PLAY models, not SERIOUS models like wot bankers use, like wot Standard Life use, like wot Bernie Madoff-with-all-da-munnay use, like wot the National Grid use, like wot NATO and the Pentagon use.

I always remember an old guy, again you won’t find it on google or anywhere else, go down the Halford river and you’ll find a couple of older local roots people who will remember someone talking about the fella I am talking about now.

He was a navy seaman in both world war one and two, and a merchantman in between (much like my own gramps) and had basically spent his entire life at sea working, he had an old 20 foot open working boat with a single lumg lister diesel inboard, and one day one of the gin palace (such as would actually fit in the Helford, which isn’t saying a lot) made some derogatory comment from the deck of his million pound sunseeker, something along the lines of when you want to stop playing at boats and come aboard a REAL SERIOUS yacht.

Old boy just squints at the tit in the tupperware palace and says, you’ll drown just as quick if you step off this boat as that one.,, mebbe quicker, as you’re a mite closer to the water on this one.

Italian banks need many billions of Euros in bailouts. A few days ago I recall reading an analysis which showed that there’s been a net outflow of stocks in over 85% of trading days in the last few months, yet somehow stocks rose in price instead of fell. This could be the start of the next big crash, or the anonymous stock buyers will step in and buy up the falling market again, kicking the can down the road again. Neither will surprise me.

This is as much a “market” as the hargesian goat bubble is, or as much as our “currencies” are wealth. When they need your money, it’s an 8 way highway in. When you want your money back, it’s a prison break out. Best not to even play the game until and unless all the rules are clear and fair for all players.

The Federal Reserve ( attempts to ) sets interest rates in an attempt to manage Inflation and Growth. I can’t find their growth goal stated but Trend Growth has been downward for the industrialized West since the 1950s, now seems to be ~2.5%, certainly less than 3%. ( assuming the Fed is actually ‘in control’ )

now, obviously, there is a HUGE problem when the total growth number is goal set to be <3% while simultaneously one of it's sub-components is being goal set to ~7%. i've run the numbers and the annualized 7% growth in the US federal budget amounts to approx 1.5% of the growth in the total economy. therefore, anything less than 1.5% annualized growth means that the private sector is actually decreasing in size …

i don't know how they're doing things in the UK but here in the US they are setting the 'baseline' by factoring monetary inflation and population growth.

this is how they say that immigration ( legal and otherwise ) is "good".

because additional immigration causes the population to grow, all population growth is considered, ipso facto, to be good for the economy.

and, given the the .Gov grows it's projected future budgets off of increases in the census numbers and that these larger .Gov expenditures go directly to an increase in the GDP total … they're kind of right, in a way? if you squint really hard?

That would be the “bums on seats” method of measuring sucess, as utilised by schools and colleges and universities nationwide, actual intrinsic value of courses / teaching / qualifications is of no import whatsoever, funding is based on bums on seats so more bums = better.